All That and a Bag of Chips

The new conservative government of England (hey, what happened to the balancing forces of a coalition?) has caved in to demands from the junk food industry and has scrapped the Food Standards Agency (the equivalent to the FDA). Which means that junk food companies are now free to self-regulate.

It seems that the junk food industry and its lobbyists weren’t terribly impressed with a motion to put stop-light style labels on the front of food packages indicating healthy and poor choices. The industry won that battle, arguing that consumers could use the existing nutrition labelling to calculate the percentage of each nutrient that the food item provided. This is similar to what we have in Canada and the US and let’s be honest – who sits down and calculates their daily intake of every nutrient?

British health secretary Andrew Lansley says the regulatory aspects of the FSA will be passed on to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). In Canada, this would be the equivalent of handing over the role of Health Canada to the Department of Agriculture – basically giving an already stressed department a double workload, regulating aspects of the industry where there is a great deal of conflict of interest.

Overall, it doesn’t bode at all well for anyone in the UK trying to fight the good fight against junk food, childhood obesity or even just maintaining safety and sanitation regulations within the food industry, such as BSE, the last of which being what the FSA was originally created to oversee.

This isn’t just a bad situation for Brits, either, as industry lobbyists will see this as a reason to put pressure on other countries to follow suit. Food in Britain, and maybe all over the world, just got royally screwed.